Internet Telephony

For most of the 20th century, global telephony was dominated by “plain old telephone service”—characterized by closed national markets, low rates of technological change, high prices of calls, and state-owned or regulated monopolies. However, the world of plain old telephone service and landlines is a historical relic, and distinctly, new geographies of telephony have come into being. Neoliberalization, deregulation, the shift to mobile or cellular phones, and the microelectronics revolution have been the prime drivers of this shift. In particular, Internet telephony has surged in significance. A clear sign of the mutually transformative impacts of the Internet and the world’s telephony system is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)—that is, telephone traffic conducted entirely through cyberspace, allowing users to bypass the toll charges ubiquitous among public ...